Doctor Who (2023) 1-07: The Legend of Ruby Sunday (Quick Review)

Episode:

882

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Serial:

311

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Jamie Donoughue

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Air Date:

15-Jun-2024

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing The Legend of Ruby Sunday, the first half of the Doctor Who re-revivals' two-part finale!

It's been a long time since we've gotten a penultimate episode written by showrunner Russell T Davies, but I have a pretty good idea what to expect from it. Everything will seem like the most important and dramatic thing to happen in the history of the universe and then it'll end with "TO BE CONTINUED".

But will it be as good as Bad Wolf, Army of Ghosts, The Sound of Drums, The Stolen Earth or The End of Time, Part 1? Honestly I think it's got a shot, as some of those episodes weren't the greatest. Especially on a second watch, when they became nothing but set up for something I'd already seen.

There will be SPOILERS below for the episode, the season so far, and any stories that get referenced.

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RECAP

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The Doctor brings Ruby to UNIT HQ to hug everyone and get their help in identifying the face they've been seeing everywhere they go. It turns out it belongs to tech billionaire Susan Triad, and UNIT already has undercover agent Mel spying on her. The Doctor also makes use of UNIT's time window technology in combination with CCTV footage of the church on Ruby Road in an attempt to get a glimpse of Ruby's mother's face. This goes very wrong when they see a second TARDIS at the scene, surrounded by swirly particle effects, and a UNIT agent is aged to dust.

The Doctor decides to go see Susan Triad, with concerns that she might be his granddaughter, and it turns out she's been dreaming of her different lives across time. She's not his family though, she's an agent of The One Who Waits, who is currently materialising around the TARDIS... Sutekh is back!


REVIEW

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The first 15 minutes of The Legend of Ruby Sunday were all about hugs and investigation as the series has finally returned to that giant UNIT HQ set from The Giggle. That means we got the awesome UNIT theme back, which I always appreciate. I loved that music before I'd even seen the episodes it was used it... somehow. Maybe I heard it on YouTube.

We got all the UNIT characters back too, well, except for scientific advisor Shirley Bingham, who's apparently busy elsewhere. Also Donna's not here, but her teenage daughter is. No Tegan, no Ace, but we do get Mel, so that's cool. She's ideal for this episode, as she's a computer expert and it turns out that woman they're all looking for is a IT genius about to launch some free software.

But Mel mostly just brings her coffee. It's similar undercover work to what Ruby was doing when she plotted to take down Roger ap Gwilliam.

In fact a lot of this is familiar, as the episode points out. The Doctor's always taking down people who are using their free technology to doom humanity, like John Lumic in Rise of the Cybermen and Daniel Barton in Spyfall. Was Atmos in The Sontaran Stratagem free? Either way Luke Rattigan totally deserves to be on the list.

The twist in this case is that it's possible the whole Triad thing was just a red herring, to screw with the Doctor and the audience.

I've been avoiding trailers and spoilers, so I didn't know anything about S Triad Technology, but RTD absolutely knew that fans would be looking for anagrams and the episode has some fun with anyone feeling smug because they spotted that 'S TRIAD' rearranges to 'TARDIS'. Those fans were on the right track though, as we get another H Arbinger and Sutekh thought it'd be amusing to put 'SU TECH' in plain sight. He's such a troll.

There's nothing funny about the word Sutekh though. Not to a guy who's written a whole bunch of Babylon 5 reviews and has had to check the spelling of the word "Drakh" each and every time they showed up in that show.

This season has avoided classic villains so far, no Daleks, no Cybermen, no Silurians, not even a solitary Sontaran. But Sutekh has been around for almost as long, about 50 years. He was a Tom Baker-era villain, from back when the series had the old diamond logo.

Hang on... was the show's current logo supposed to be a clue to the villain? If we get a modern version of the 80s neon tube logo next season I'm going to start expecting the Rani to show up.

I don't know how the average fan of the current series reacted to the reveal, but I expect it was a lot like when the Master appeared in Utopia... except the Master was another Time Lord, and that was a big deal on its own.

The episode gives you enough context to know that this guy's a major threat that the Doctor has faced before, but on its own the name Sutekh is more likely to make people scratch their heads than it is to blow their minds. In fact, it's downright weird to end Doctor Who's new season 1 with the shocking reveal of any classic villain. This was supposed to be a jumping on point for new viewers!

It's funny, as RTD already nailed this with his original first series finale, when he brought back the Daleks after thoroughly reintroducing them 6 episodes earlier in Dalek. Everyone knew who they were at that point.

Pyramids of Mars, Part Four

Though the way this series has been constructed, I'm thinking that it wasn't a coincidence that The Devil's Chord featured a scene straight out of Pyramids of Mars, where the heroes returned to the present day to find that it had been destroyed. I'm sure plenty of videos and articles mentioned how similar it was, and anyone looking up the serial out of curiosity would have noticed that it just happens to feature one of the most powerful gods that ever appeared in Doctor Who.

That wasn't the classic series threat I was thinking of though. All the meta elements this season had my mind wandering down a 'Land of Fiction' track. And I'd completely missed the 'giant evil jackal-head god' noises the TARDIS had been making each episode.

Sutekh's looking a bit different these days, but they actually brought back the same voice actor who played the role 50 years ago! Plus he's still got that Egyptian theming going on, so it's cool.

Speaking of themes, the episode doesn't just focus on the mother that abandoned Ruby, but also the granddaughter abandoned by the Doctor... who does not make an appearance in this story. Maybe Susan Foreman will still appear in the finale, there's always a twist at the end, but it seems like the villains were genuinely surprised that the Doctor thought Susan Triad was family.

I don't mind the series tormenting us with false hope, but I am not keen on the Doctor saying that he hasn't had his kids yet. He's hinted at or mentioned being a father before in RTD-era episodes like The Empty Child, Fear Her and The Doctor's Daughter. In fact, he was calling himself a dad just a few episodes ago in Boom! I don't know what RTD is planning here, but so far I don't like this retcon one bit.

Yeah, I know the Doctor invoked a superstition at the edge of the universe allowing the Toymaker to make a jigsaw puzzle out of his history, but I don't much like that either.

Anyway, it seems Susan Triad was just a regular nice billionaire genius until her transformation into a zombie, and I guess the explanation for her face being everywhere is "A god did it". So she serves Sutekh now and I suppose Mrs. Flood has been a servant of Sutekh from at least the end of The Church on Ruby Road. The mystery has been revealed: they're both evil! Flood is so evil that she won't even get Cherry a cup of tea, which is basically a crime in Britain.

Though I guess they didn't make it explicit that she's a bad guy, only that she knows the One Who Waits is coming. Maybe she is actually Susan Foreman hiding herself away, or Ruby's mother, or both. Maybe she's the Doctor's mother! Maybe she's Kate's cousin! Who even knows at this point?

In fact, it's pretty crazy that we still don't know who Ruby's mother is, considering the amount of time the episode devotes to figuring it out.

The first 15 minutes of episode were all about hugging people at UNIT and setting up Susan Triad, then the entire next 15 minutes all took place in UNIT's holodeck. This scene really did remind me of those Star Trek stories where they'd reconstruct a scene in virtual reality to solve the mystery, except UNIT has considerably less success. I should've known they'd never be able to see the woman's face when they mentioned that the security camera footage had been filmed from 73 yards away. Well, 72 yards, close enough.

The trouble with this sequence is that it just keeps going and going, continually hinting that you're going to learn something soon, building up the tension and raising anticipation... and going and going and going. You know that scene in The Zygon Inversion where Peter Capaldi delivers that huge speech about war to convince the rebel Zygon not to push the button? That was 5 minutes shorter than this. I know that it's like rewatching an old episode of classic Doctor Who on a worn out VHS looking for clues, but it didn't need to start approaching the same run time.

The sequence does lead somewhere in the end however. It takes the show's sanctuary and makes it scary.

The TARDIS is Doctor Who's Millennium Falcon and Enterprise. It is home and safety, a friend and ally, and man is it ominous at the end of this episode. The beautiful Ghost Monument is suddenly feeling like a unknowable obelisk from an alien civilisation wearing the form of something absolutely incongruous to this time and place. A blue box of wrongness.

I don't know if Sutekh has corrupted the TARDIS, or if this is a consequence of the Doctor duplicating it with a big magic hammer, or what's going on, but it's a bit of a concern! I don't remember seeing anything quite like this in Doctor Who before.

Susan turning into a skull-faced villain that turns people into a dust was a little bit Flux though.


RATING

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The Legend of Ruby Sunday a real flashback to the two-part finales of the David Tennant era, where everything felt like the most important thing in the world and you got a massive cliffhanger in the middle. I think the one it most reminds me of is Army of Ghosts, with Torchwood, the Cybermen and the Daleks. The Doctor's investigating something weird, he ends up in a high-tech skyscraper run by an organisation that deals with alien threats, and he realises to his horror that his old nemesis is back.

Both episodes are mostly set up for the epic finale, but I think Army of Ghosts has a bit more of a plot to it. The situation progresses throughout the episode and the Doctor continues to learns things and make decisions throughout. In The Legend of Ruby Sunday, the Doctor does two things: rewatch the end of The Church on Ruby Road and ask Susan Twist about her dreams. That's it. The episode's all about withholding information from the characters and the audience to build up anticipation for the answers. It does get to a big 'holy shit' revelation at the end, but that just raises further questions!

It's a really well produced episode for sure, full of tension, good acting, menacing music etc. But that can only go so far in hiding the fact that this is all just prologue for the actual story. It's like 60% of a first part, padded out to a normal episode length, so I think I'm being very generous giving it...

6/10

Hopefully next episode is the dramatic reveal of the Richard E. Grant Doctor. Or maybe we'll actually get Susan. Or perhaps a legend involving Ruby Sunday. I dunno, I just want something.

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COMING SOON

Doctor Who's new season will conclude with Empire of Death!

You're welcome to leave a comment in the meantime. Personally, I'm going to be busy permanently blocking every YouTube channel that put the word 'Sutekh' in a thumbnail.